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It makes sense that after a certain period of time, ________________________ corporation will stop supporting their products. That's entirely natural. If I had my own company, I wouldn't perpetually support it either. Be it 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, at some point it has to end.

By having the documents, we can support it ourselves and provide our own support. Yes, __________________ corporation makes the product and sells it to us, and for a period of years they provide the primary support. But after that we don't have to be locked into them. We are empowered. We can keep going.

We don't have to buy another product just because they say we have to. The product we own right now works perfectly fine, and I intend to keep using it. Let's put it into numbers. Let's say that _________________________ corporation provides 4 years in-house support. The community might then support it for the next 4 years.

community support isn't good. you are left up to a dev to decide what he wants to work on, and when you complain you get told to do it yourself. You have a bunch of people that want to work on features, but no one wants to work on the boring bugs.

In both instances I'm referring to R200. For anybody who may not know, this is 10+ year old hardware - debut 2001. (and see the discussions too, people still use these)

Community doesn't exclusively mean individuals anymore. If a 3rd party corporation sees a need to fix said bugs, they will be fixed. But this can only happen if the docs are released.

I am more than happy with 10 years of support. In fact, I encourage it!(for popular hardware, anyways. Which these were indeed popular) I can't tell you how happy it makes me to see guys like Marek running around here.

If I ran my own company like this, I probably wouldn't release docs for my newest generation, maybe the newest two. But in the context of nVidia there really isn't any reason for them to keep the docs for 3-5 year hardware under lock and key anymore. I'd bet AMD has something more advanced than GeForce 7s/8s. At this point, they're only pissing off their customers who are more than willing to provide their own support. It's bad customer support to not release the docs.

Nouveau is a testament to the fact that a) Linus was right with his FU nVidia and b) We are going to support ourselves anyways. They might as well just release the docs, and it appears that that message is sinking in.

Sorry, that was obviously wrong.
I messed it up while editing that line. :/
I wanted to express my disappointment about the docs covering
Tegra only and only a rather tiny fraction of the chip capabilities.

I agree it is a good thing, in terms of "not a bad thing",
but it really doesn't sound too promising to me.
Why don't they release more complete docs?
And why do they refuse to do the same for the desktop asics?

It's possible they cannot release docs for their desktop card ASICS due to 3rd party IP restrictions. If they can bring the design work inhouse and use as little 3rd party IP as possible then they could be able to open up documentation for the 3d
parts.

I concur with the poster above that nVidia should release documentation for their older cards that are at end of life so that we as a community can support ourselves by having an open driver so we can continue to use these cards

It's possible they cannot release docs for their desktop card ASICS due to 3rd party IP restrictions. If they can bring the design work inhouse and use as little 3rd party IP as possible then they could be able to open up documentation for the 3d
parts.

They've made noises about integrating ARM on the desktop side too, which makes me wonder whether they might move the low-level stuff into an embedded firmware blob and document a higher-level host interface. Of course, the cynical side of me says that they'd then wrap that firmware in encryption/DRM and sell feature unlock codes a la carte (SLI? $25. Overclocking? $50. Autodesk-certified mode? $500. Full double precision compute performance? $1500.).

I concur with the poster above that nVidia should release documentation for their older cards that are at end of life so that we as a community can support ourselves by having an open driver so we can continue to use these cards

especially the firmware technology from their Quadro series, since hopefully that would still work for todays cards

especially the firmware technology from their Quadro series, since hopefully that would still work for todays cards

Maybe a utility to do the firmware dumps for just about any nvidia card would be great to have so that we can use the firmware with nouveau, and if nvidia can provide some documentation about the entry points and such do the nouveau devs can implement features

Originally Posted by Ex-Cyber

They've made noises about integrating ARM on the desktop side too, which makes me wonder whether they might move the low-level stuff into an embedded firmware blob and document a higher-level host interface. Of course, the cynical side of me says that they'd then wrap that firmware in encryption/DRM and sell feature unlock codes a la carte (SLI? $25. Overclocking? $50. Autodesk-certified mode? $500. Full double precision compute performance? $1500.).